This book presents a collection of over one hundred fifty biographical entries on women and men who advocated women’s equality in the area of contemporary Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE). The region is represented by twenty two states, including Albania, Austria, Belarussia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The geographic and temporal scope of this project roughly encompasses the historical areas of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires (and succeeding states) during the nineteenth and twentieth century. The dictionary does not contain entries on living activists. Diverse stages of research in local women’s histories determine the selection of representative figures and their number; in some cases writers outnumber social and political activists. Entries are written along the traditional biographical scheme, providing information about family life and social background, descriptions of forms of activism, relevant institutions, initiatives, and publications. Each entry is aided by a selection of primary and secondary sources. Pictures accompany almost all of the entries, but unfortunately they are of a poor quality. A short synopsis precedes each entry, although the decision to print them in a different and larger font is questionable.
This is the first attempt to bring together biographical information on activists and feminists in CESEE women’s movements. The project emerged in the most suitable place for this purpose: at Central European University in Budapest. Yet the final enterprise involved over a hundred historians, literary scholars, feminist activists, and students from the entire region. The excellent team of authors represents two generations of post-1989 women’s historians in CESEE, many of whom published path-breaking research in their respective countries.
The main goal of this dictionary is to offer reliable information on the history of women’s movements and feminism in CESEE. The editors’ aim is to provide comparative materials for students and researchers looking at the history of feminism and the women’s movement from a transnational perspective. Thus, the project should be prized for its large scale, educational value, and for bringing to light feminism in CESEE in the English language. Such an ambitious project begs for a closer look, as the methods of its implementation will influence the final outlook on the nineteenth and twentieth century history of feminism and women’s movements in the region. Its methods and representations encapsulate current tendencies in historiography in and on the region that reach beyond the field of women’s history, and relate to the larger problem of practices of historical knowledge production in CESEE. The present re-evaluation of history and historiography in post-communist democracies is embedded in the political and cultural nexus between coming to terms with the pre- and post-communist pasts, as well as with nationalist and united European presents and hopefully, futures. This volume might thus be regarded as an outcome of such currents, a historiographical derivative of the processes of reconstructing political and cultural identities, as well as a revision and reevaluation of history in CESEE, while changing the view of who (which groups as well as personalities) should be included as historical actors.
The format of a biographical dictionary provides rich human histories, however entries in this dictionary vary a great deal in their approaches to such issues as territoriality, nation/nationality and political ideologies. This diversity might be regarded as the strength of this project; it provides insight into the complexities of ideological and cultural tensions of the women’s history that has been recently published in CESEE. What unifies this project however, is its political aim: to provide a “historical support” for contemporary feminism in the region by presenting it as a historical continuation of once interrupted indigenous women’s movements, rather than as simply a post-1989 Western ideological import (P. 3). Thus, the project responds to the very real problem of the deepening and institutionalizing of gender inequality in the countries of the region (mostly post-communist ones).
The editors aimed to demonstrate that despite neglecting the subject in international scholarship, women’s movements and feminism in CESEE were not simply “Western imports” but rather “local traditions” (P. 2), and in this they succeed. They criticize Eric Hobsbawm’s arguments from the Age of Empire that the women’s movement emerged as a consequence of the processes of modernization and industrialization, and became a solely urban phenomenon by pointing to the success of feminism in rural societies (e.g., the success of the Ukrainian mass women’s movement) (P. 1). But the editors also stress the marginalization of CESEE feminism and women’s movements within feminist scholarship. Bemoaning the dominance of the West-centric perspective in women’s history, the editors subscribe to the criticism of the “imperialism” of Western feminists once formulated within post-colonial studies, and blame them for carrying on an analytical “concomitant notion of superiority and the belief in having the right perspective, if not the duty to impose that on others” (P. 4). Thus, the dictionary emerges as an attempt to recuperate the history of CESEE feminism and women’s movements for transnational women’s history and challenge the practices of “subaltarnization” within feminism and women’s studies.
Though CESEE women are certainly under-represented in women’s history, it would be unfair to forget that feminism and women’s historiography (or, generally women’s studies) have a rather complicated and, one may argue, rather short history in the region. There is not space enough here to analyze contemporary feminist movements in CESEE but it seems worth mentioning that after 1989, at least in post-communist states, feminism was inspired and assisted by Western organizations, and that two generations of contemporary feminist activists in former Eastern Europe have looked for ideas, concepts, theories, methods of policy making, role models, and encouragement among their Western networks, rather than in their own histories. Contemporary feminist interest in excavating indigenous women’s history is somewhat limited by resources, political and social priorities, and limited popular and academic demand. Although feminists of the region do not overlook the importance of feminist education, it seems that history is not a high priority on the list of feminist courses (at least in Poland). The practical reason for ambiguity toward women’s history lies partly in the structures of historical knowledge production, and the attitude of professional historians toward feminism and women’s history in CESEE.
It was only after 1989 that the new theoretical inspirations slowly made their way to historiographies in post-communist academies, which were busy shedding the paradigm of Leninist historical materialism. Since then, women’s and gender history found itself in a precarious position, surrounded by suspicions of smuggling Marxism back into history, and of promoting a feminist individualism that was often regarded as endangering traditional values and “naturally asymmetric” gender relationships as viewed by liberals leaning toward the right. Often ridiculed and little aided by social and political support, women’s history in CESEE has been struggling to find its place within post-communist academic institutions, trying to convince skeptics, and attract students. For the last fifteen years researchers in women’s history have continued to recover basic information on the history of feminism and women’s movements, but they rarely contextualize the results of their research in a transnational perspective, and even more rarely apply feminist theories to their interpretations. In effect, historians, on the one hand, tend to treat even their own research on women’s history as supplementary to the “serious” historical issues; on the other, they try to keep an “objective” perspective in research by deliberately ignoring or distancing themselves from feminist theory and feminist history. Both approaches successfully promote a general lack of interest in “foreign” and transnational women’s history and, ultimately, the inability to speak a common language within a field. Such an attitude gives a domestic reason for what the editors recognize as a form of subalternization of CESEE women’s history within West-centrist scholarship (P. 4). We can only hope that the growing number of transnational publications and collaborative research projects will further encourage conversations not only between the West and CESEE, but among CESEE historians themselves, thereby breaking the mode of isolationism and nation-centric researches in women’s history.
Another interesting feature of this project is its open understanding of feminism and the women’s movement. The editors differed between feminism and women’s movement and decided not to predefine the main analytical categories of this project. The historical distinction between the women’s movement and feminism became less relevant in this project, because the editors “sought to keep an open mind in order not to exclude a priori writings and activities that aimed to improve women’s status and position (as part of a ‘women’s movement’), yet did not necessarily aim for women’s equality with men and/or to challenge patriarchal structure (as ‘feminism’ is generally defined as doing)” (P. 5). Using such an approach, the editors wished to comply with the academic discourses on women’s history in the represented countries, avoid potential dilemmas with labeling some activists as feminists, and include in the project feminist as well as non-feminist historians. In order to help achieve this, they asked national teams of authors to propose a list of relevant names. Thus, the local experts decided which historical figures to include as a national representatives and how to rank them. In effect, the difference between feminism and various forms of advocacy for women’s equality blur and merge in this project.
The implementation of this project, involving international collaboration, brought an interesting twist to mapping the history of women’s movements on the contemporary map of the region. Six maps of the current CESEE (slightly favoring the Habsburg Empire), cover the time period 1804-2005. The editors deliberately challenged the Cold War division of Europe, which for decades has structured the production of knowledge in Western academies. In spite of the fact that over the last decade the borders of NATO and the European Union have shifted, the common division between Eastern and Western Europe is still at work, going beyond the colloquial or journalistic usage. Most interestingly, “former Eastern Europe,” as a category built into past academic scholarship, still defines many academic institutions associated with the former Soviet area studies, and is being used as a social and cultural category of analysis and geo-political marker. One of the features of this structure of knowledge production is the unequal distribution of scholarly attention within Eastern Europe in favor of Russia/Soviet Union, which is clearly justifiable for political reasons. Certainly Russian and Soviet women’s history is better represented in Western scholarship than that of other CESEE counterparts. The proliferation and advancement in research on Russia/Soviet Union is also visible in the dictionary.
This project should therefore also be appreciated as an attempt to rethink the local and national histories within the regional perspective. This perspective is two-fold: focusing on feminism as a particular emancipating program on the one hand, and on geo-political location and imperial heritages on the other. While criticizing the West-centrism in women’s history, the editors claim to focus on areas “‘outside’ of the ‘core’” of mainstream feminist studies represented by England, France, and Germany (P. 5). However, while defining the area of interest using the three empires as a geo-political marker, it is difficult to justify the exclusion of Germany. Even if well represented in the “core” women’s history, German feminists played too important a role in the international network in CESEE, inspiring other national feminist movements (i.e. Ukrainian) to simply omit them. If the new geopolitical concept of CESEE is meant to encompass post-communist Eastern Europe – enlarged by contemporary Austria, Greece, and Turkey – and then applied to historical research as a territorial synonym for the area once dominated by three empires, we still see certain leftovers cut of from the “core,” such as the German partition of Poland (Posnania), Silesia, or Finland.
The choice of biography, according to editors, allows them to demonstrate the connection between “public” and “private” spheres, and to trace the formal and informal network of feminist activism. It also helps overcome differences between social structures, political and cultural practices in CESEE, and to stress the role of human agency in the history of the women’s movement and feminism in the region (Pp. 3-4). Indeed, in such a project, which by definition focuses on elites, the role of agency becomes easy to argue. It seems, however, that the argument of multicultural and post-colonial feminism – that race and class difference structures inequality within feminist politics – should not be overlooked. While it is necessary to recuperate the lives of the leaders of feminist and women’s movements, it seems worth mentioning that the life experiences of the elite cannot be representative for women whom they sought to represent. Both agency and structure are important for our understanding of the complicated dynamics of power relations between the interests of feminist elites and the interests of represented women.
Though recognizing cultural, social, and political differences between the countries represented in this project, the editors emphasize overriding similarities in gender relationships in CESEE. They see them in the commonality of patriarchal oppressions and unequal gender hierarchies (P. 6), in women’s demands for access to education, in feminists’ interests in women’s history, and in connections of CESEE women’s movements with international feminism (P. 8). All these similarities, however, can hardly be regarded as specific only to CESEE women’s movements; nevertheless, they validate the geographical scope of this project. More convincingly, the editors point to the important role of nationalism and socialism for the process of women’s emancipation as characteristic of the women’s movement and feminism in CESEE. Both movements encouraged women to enter politics where, according to the editors, they could exercise their agency to criticize and change the nationalist and socialist projects from within, for the sake of gender equality: “These findings support an alternative feminist reading that does not reduce the histories of nationalism or socialism to male-dominated rhetorical exercises in gender equality” (P. 6). Such an alternative reading is meant to demonstrate “the ways in which women saw nationalist and socialist projects as necessary to their own emancipation as women, while many at the same time recognized gendered exclusionary practices as problematic features of those projects” (P. 6).
The attempt to translate political presence directly into historical biographies might not only cause problems with spelling names, but also the hazard of simplifying the processes of acquiring national and cultural identities. The relevance of these processes became especially visible, because this project by definition focuses on cosmopolitan, ethnic, and cultural elites of the region. For many activists represented in this book, and for women in particular, it was their public activism, often connected to nationalist and socialist politics that called for individual self-identification. Activists of women’s movements often played a significant role as agents in “awakening” national (or class) consciousness, but their lives rarely bore one and uncontested mark of national identity. Problematizing the construction of identities might enrich this project, especially regarding the complexity of nationalist politics in the region. Various and changing forms of statehood, ongoing renegotiations of the criteria of national belonging, and civic and ethnic notions of citizenship provide an important historical framework to understand the particularities of CESEE women’s movements and feminism.
For work on this project, the editors relied on international cooperation structured around national coordinators who proposed their choices of representative figures. Regarding the scale of this project, it is hard to challenge its collaborative method, but one might ask about possible consequences of this method for the final outcome. As much as this international project should be appreciated, historians need to be cautious about placing both individual biographies of activists, and a general history of the women’s movement and feminism into the contemporary political map of CESEE. This national classification of historical advocates for gender equality raises questions that seem difficult to dismiss: How do we classify feminists who identified themselves with ethnic groups or civic nations that are not represented on the current map of the region? Should Jewish feminists connected with the Zionist movement, or just serving their own communities, be excluded from the picture? How do we attribute national identity to feminists who constructed their identity in relation to the Yugoslav or Czechoslovak civic national identity? Or, how do we categorize those who renounced their national origins altogether? It would be interesting to know how the national coordinators of succeeding states of former federations divided the responsibility of presenting feminist activists as national representatives among themselves, and who was dropped off the list because they lacked a contemporary nation-state patron.
Jewish women present the most conspicuous absentees. In only three cases the synopsis of entries stresses the Jewishness of the subjects; two of them are Russian Jewish revolutionaries: Esther Frumkin and Anna Kal’manovich, whose biographies were written by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild of Harvard University. The third and last example, written by Vera Vesković-Vangeli of the Institute of National History in Skopje, is Haim Estreya Ovadya, who was an activist for the emancipation of Jewish women, a Zionist activist, a Yugoslavian communist, and a Macedonian partisan. Though well represented elsewhere, Rosa Luksemburg appears in the dictionary only in the biographies of others. Her exclusion might be easily argued by the geographical ban on Germany and the omission of well-known activists, but the fact that she was Jewish-born in Poland, engaged in the Polish revolutionary movement, renounced any nationality, and was a social democrat and a Marxist who argued for gender equality, makes her absence rather awkward. Hopefully, the editors of the volume left a door open for revisions with the expectation that the second edition of the dictionary will pay attention to “significant minority groups within the geographical territory covered here” (P. xii).
Apparently socialism caused more problems for the authors than nationalism did. The editors mention a “certain hesitancy among scholars about including socialist or communist feminists” into the project, since communist feminism is itself a contradiction (P. 8). Some contributors argued against the inclusion of communist feminists, because “first socialists and later communists have denounced and attacked the women’s movement as ‘bourgeois,’ and made explicit their aversion to ‘feminism’” (P. 8). The editors defend their choice to include socialist feminists by noticing that socialism was one of the approaches to social justice, and that there were many socialists who argued for women’s equality, though they were never members of the women’s movement. Many women-socialists became critical towards the patriarchal practices in socialism, and many identified themselves as socialists and feminists. The continuity of political biographies provides yet another argument for including feminists and communists into the collective picture. This type of project demands openness of approach, and the editors warn against ideological dogmatism: “if our biographical subjects were able to bridge the contradictions between feminism, nationalism, socialism, communism, philanthropy and revolution in their own lives – then surely historians, including women’s historians, must adopt similarly open approach to their own research and methodologies, rather than creating forms of closure through the use of predefined and potentially limited categories” (P. 10).
Thus, the project embodies the ideological uncertainties and hesitancies of contemporary historiography in the region. On the one hand, the necessity to justify the inclusion of socialist and communist advocates for women’s equality is a response to the collaborators’ – and potential future readers’ –doubts in this matter. On the other hand, the labeling of activists and their involvement in nationalist politics comes off as natural, with no need for further validation: in one case an author denies the socialist sympathies of her subject even while further contradicting her own statement by the facts presented (P. 80); many others demonstrate the involvement of their feminist protagonist in nationalist politics without further explanation. Thus, the project presents the ways in which CESEE activists for women’s equality entered mass politics in alliance and compliance with nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies.
Needless to say, the common cause of fighting patriarchal oppression and gender inequality connected CESEE feminists and advocates for women’s rights only occasionally; in political practice there were other, stronger, ideological and political differences that often made their cooperation difficult if not impossible. If feminist campaigns for access to higher education and the right to vote in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were able to unify a women’s front across nationalities, then after 1918 the international feminist forum became an extension of the diplomatic arena for nationalist politics, as the Polish feminists’ boycott of Ukrainian women’s organizations demonstrates. Attitudes toward socialism and communism caused one hiatus within the women’s movement, alienating women along class and ideological lines; but nationalism caused another, violently alienating women of all classes, as national “others.”
In conclusion, this dictionary is certainly a great achievement, without precedent, exposing not only the “rich tapestry of feminist activity” (P. 1), but also a stimulus to the further rethinking of – and further research in – the transnational history of feminism and women’s movements in CESEE, or hopefully, beyond it.